Pam's Book 15: Sarah's Key

On July 16, 1942, French policemen rounded up several thousand Parisian Jews and held them in the Velodrome D'Hiver, an indoor bicycle racing facility. The Nazis made the order, but it was Frenchmen who carried it out. They were only supposed to round up adults, but they took it upon themselves to gather 4,051 children as well. They were held for days in the Velodrome and then taken by cattle calls to French detention camps. Men were separated from the women and children, and then the children were brutally, physically, bloodily separated from their mothers. The adults were taken to Auschwitz while the children were held, alone, with no one to care for them, in the French camps. Later, the children were mixed in with other adults for transport to Auschwitz (the Nazis had never asked for these children), and, upon arrival, taken straight to the gas chambers. The incident is known today as the Vel d'Hiv. It is a sickening, horrifying story, made all the worse by the French complicity; the gendarmes carried the entire thing out, not the Nazis.

Sarah's Key tells two interwoven stories: that of Julia Jarmand, an American ex-pat living in modern-day Paris, and Sarah Starzynski, a Polish Jew living in France, a ten-year-old victim of the Vel d'Hiv. When the police come to take Sarah and her family, she hides her little brother in a secret cupboard, promising to come back for him soon; she is too young to understand she is never coming back. Meanwhile, in the present, Julia is assigned to write a story about the Vel d'Hiv for its sixtieth commemoration. She becomes captivated by the events of July 16, 1942, and soon discovers that her in-laws had moved into the Starzynskis' apartment soon after the roundup. Julia delves into Sarah's story. The story is told in alternating voices, Sarah's and Julia's. Ultimately, Sarah's story becomes an integral part of Julia's.

Like Julia, I've studied the Holocaust, have read books about it, have visited a French WWII museum, have visited a concentration camp, but I had never heard of the Vel d'Hiv. My sophomores just finished reading Maus, a Holocaust story (the author's parents') told in graphic novel form, and the two stories could not have been more different, nor could have been related in more disparate ways. Yet they both have the same effect: they bring the atrocities to life for the reader, showing us a side of human nature we'd like never to admit exists at all. In Maus, the police of occupied Poland also played a role in the terrors of the Jews. These were ordinary, everyday people who committed atrocities by day and came home to their wives and children at night, went to church on Sunday mornings. Yet, had they not been complicit, what would have happened to them, to their wives and children?

As you can see from the dates between this post and the last, I read this book in two days. I couldn't put it down. It tore my heart out, but I had to keep reading so I could find out what happened to Sarah, to her little brother, to Julia. I think I'm going to pick up something light and fluffy that I've already read before I read another book for this blog.